The Morning Wrap: MLA Quits Seat To Make Way For Jayalalithaa; Commission Asks Government To Split OBCs

Indian chief minister of Tamil Nadu J. Jayalalithaa (C) arrives at a hotel in Bangalore to take part in talks with chief Ministers of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka on the Cauvery water sharing row, on November 29, 2012. The talks failed to break the ice with both sides sticking to their positions. AFP PHOTO/ Manjunath KIRAN (Photo credit should read Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images)

The Morning Wrap is HuffPost India's selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers. Subscribe here to receive it in your inbox each weekday morning.

Essential HuffPost

India plans to recruit over 11,000 women in central security forces for combat duties such as border guarding and law and order assignments. However most of these positions are in the constabulary and there are no plans--not even in the horizon-- to open combat positions to women.

Birds have the fundamental right to "live with dignity" and fly in the sky without being kept in cages or subjected to cruelty, Delhi High Court has said while holding that trades that involved caging them was a "violation of their rights".

Adding to the violence in Kabul, a car bomb rammed a convoy of foreign troops near the main airport in Afghanistan's capital on Sunday, killing at least three civilians.

Amna Khawar asks if positive story telling can be used to change the narrative of despair in Pakistan.

Main News

The National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC) has sought the government's nod to categorize backward castes in the central list of Other Backward Classes into three groups, and limit each group's claim to a fraction of the 27% reservation, that they now get for government jobs and college seats.

At a time when both CM Nitish Kumar and his estranged aide Jitan Ram Manjhi are claiming to be the leader of Mahadalits ahead of Bihar Assembly polls, an extremely poor and predominantly-Dalit village in that state has seen 30 per cent of its population been categorized as 'above the poverty line' and therefore ineligible for benefits.

Communist Party of India General Secretary, Sitaram Yechury, today accused the Centre of violating the Delhi government's rights, thus siding with Arvind Kejriwal in his ongoing feud with Najeeb Jung, the Lieutanant Governor of Delhi over the control of administrative powers in Delhi.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has asked its affiliates not to publicly attack the Narendra Modi government over their differences, while reassuring them that it is taking up the contentious issues internally with the various ministries. RSS leaders have said that there were 72 outstanding points - including 29 extremely contentious ones -that would be resolved through dialogue.

Scientists have found in India's Spiti Valley fresh geochemical signatures of a catastrophic event that wiped out over 80 per cent of species on earth about 252 million years ago.

The Islamic State group seized control of the city of Ramadi on Sunday sending Iraqi forces racing out of the city in a major loss, despite the support of US-led airstrikes targeting the extremist organisation.

Off The Front Page

An AIADMK lawmaker today resigned his seat in the nick of time to beat an Election Commission convention and enable Jayalalithaa to enter the Tamil Nadu Assembly through a bye-election.

MP Rajesh Ranjan, alias Pappu Yadav, who was convicted for murder in 2009 and has opportunistically joined every party in Bihar since the 1990s, finally announced the formation of his own party, Jan Karanti Adhikar Morcha, aimed at providing a "strong third option" to Bihar voters in the upcoming state election.

Claiming that corruption had substantially declined in Delhi since the AAP came to power, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal also cited how his daughter experimented with morally-dubious entrapment to test an officer in the transport department.

An activist has moved the Delhi high court to save T-24, a Ranthambore tiger and better known as Ustad, from losing his freedom over what he says are unproven charges of being a man-killer.

MIT scientists have cracked the science behind the dress that went viral on the internet after some saw it as black and blue while others perceived it to be gold and white.

Opinion

Christophe Jafferlot, in The Indian Express, says that Modi's push for land acquisition comes from his relatively-smooth experience in Gujarat that may not necessarily hold across other states.

Shiv Visvanathan, discussing how violence plays out in India, says in The Hindu that "...India is a great body that digests violence and is content to live with the logic of it, happy with conceptual ideas like security, growth and desire which allow us to calculate, consume and erase violence..."

Dani Rodrik and Sharun Mukand, argue in Mint that though political theory frequently shows that democracy turns out to be illiberal, the real surprise is that liberal democracy actually ever emerges.